# Privacy-Preserving Fair Synthetic Tabular Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.02968 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02968/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [Membership Inference Attacks against Machine Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.05820/) (2016)
- [Equality of Opportunity in Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02413/) (2016)
- [Modeling Tabular data using Conditional GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00503/) (2019)
- [Fair prediction with disparate impact: A study of bias in recidivism prediction instruments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.07524/) (2016)
- [Tabular Data: Deep Learning is Not All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03253/) (2021)
- [Deep Neural Networks and Tabular Data: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01889/) (2021)
- [Deep Models Under the GAN: Information Leakage from Collaborative Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.07464/) (2017)
- [Differentially Private Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06739/) (2018)
- [Gender Bias in Neural Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11714/) (2018)
- [Generating Multi-label Discrete Patient Records using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06490/) (2017)
- [How Faithful is your Synthetic Data? Sample-level Metrics for Evaluating and Auditing Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08921/) (2021)
- [FairGAN: Fairness-aware Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11202/) (2018)
- [CTAB-GAN: Effective Table Data Synthesizing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08369/) (2021)
- [DECAF: Generating Fair Synthetic Data Using Causally-Aware Generative Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12884/) (2021)
- [Winning the NIST Contest: A scalable and general approach to differentially private synthetic data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04978/) (2021)
- [Synthesizing Tabular Data using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11264/) (2018)
- [Benchmarking Differentially Private Synthetic Data Generation Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09238/) (2021)
- [Stereotype and Skew: Quantifying Gender Bias in Pre-trained and Fine-tuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09688/) (2021)
- [TabFairGAN: Fair Tabular Data Generation with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00666/) (2021)
- [SynthEval: A Framework for Detailed Utility and Privacy Evaluation of Tabular Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15821/) (2024)
- [Privacy-Preserving Synthetic Data Generation for Recommendation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13133/) (2022)
- [Really Useful Synthetic Data -- A Framework to Evaluate the Quality of Differentially Private Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07740/) (2020)
- [Routes for breaching and protecting genetic privacy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.3197/) (2013)
- [Synthetic Data: Revisiting the Privacy-Utility Trade-off](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07926/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Portable Causal Fairness Across Synthetic Data Generator Families](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.03180/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Sharing of tabular data containing valuable but private information is limited due to legal and ethical issues. Synthetic data could be an alternative solution to this sharing problem, as it is artificially generated by machine learning algorithms and tries to capture the underlying data distribution. However, machine learning models are not free from memorization and may introduce biases, as they rely on training data. Producing synthetic data that preserves privacy and fairness while maintaining utility close to the real data is a challenging task. This research simultaneously addresses both the privacy and fairness aspects of synthetic data, an area not explored by other studies. In this work, we present PF-WGAN, a privacy-preserving, fair synthetic tabular data generator based on the WGAN-GP model. We have modified the original WGAN-GP by adding privacy and fairness constraints forcing it to produce privacy-preserving fair data. This approach will enable the publication of datasets that protect individual's privacy and remain unbiased toward any particular group. We compared the results with three state-of-the-art synthetic data generator models in terms of utility, privacy, and fairness across four different datasets. We found that the proposed model exhibits a more balanced trade-off among utility, privacy, and fairness.